Last week’s episode brought us an epic final showdown between Tatsuya’s group and the remaining Parasites. Once again the Shiba proved how strong they were together and defeated the combined form of the Parasites, shocking even Lina. In the end, a severely depressed Lina got an offer from Tatsuya to quit being a soldier and live as a regular high school student—an offer that she refused.
Episode 11 begins with a brief original and anime-only scene. Lina finally reveals her reason for staying as Sirius, and that is simply because no one else would. However, her realization that she can be anyone other than Sirius means that she is beginning to understand what Tatsuya wanted for her, which is a nice character development.
With the defeat of the Parasites comes another disappointing moment for our heroes: much like the first time they had captured the three previous Parasites, Leo, Erika, and Mikihiko has unintentionally let the surviving ones they had sealed during the final battle. It is kind of funny, really, and I do hope it doesn’t become a running gag as the series progresses. Thankfully, Tatsuya is an understanding and reasonable individual, so he simply let his friends’ failure slide.
One thing that anime-only watchers will certainly not realize is the significant of those black feathers that Tatsuya saw, and it has to do with its meaning in Japanese. In Nihonggo, black feathers translates to “Kurobane”, the same name as Ayako’s surname, minus the last two letters. It is enough to make Tatsuya deduced who took the Parasites, which makes him wonder what the Yotsuba plans to do with it.
The next scenes after that fit more as a proper ending to this arc. Graduation finally arrives, and we see all our favorite characters together one last time before some of them part ways. Mayumi, Katsuto, and Mari, among a few others, will leave high school for university. We are also given one last fanservice involving Lina, and she looked really good in her singer outfit. What I loved most here is the fact that they slightly changed this particular scene. In the novel, Lina was just wearing her regular school uniform when she took the stage. But in this adaptation, they managed to make her even more cuter by replacing her attire with the ones seen in the anime.
Shizuku finally returns home from her study abroad, and it is a happy reunion with the entire gang. She also brought some information from Rey, though much like the novel, it was never revealed what those information are.
With her mission finished, Lina returns to her home country. There is a final heartwarming scene between her and the Shiba siblings as Lina bids farewell, and this is where Miyuki confesses that Lina will always be her rival. If you have read the light novels, this is a slight foreshadowing of what their relationship would become, especially around Tatsuya.
As the Visitor Arc officially ends, we now begin an anime-original mini-arc titled “Teacher’s Draft”; at least, that’s what I think it’s called based on the post from Twitter. But while it is original, the initial scenes are taken from the first thirty pages of Volume 12, Double Seven. Tatsuya begins his second year at last, and if you think the scene is quite familiar, that’s because it is the same one we saw at ending credits of the movie, which officially ties the two together. However, whether the events there will be mentioned in this season or not is still unknown at this point.
We are also introduced to Minami(voiced by Kiyono Yasuno), one of Yotsuba’s Sakurai series of enhanced magicians trained as maids and bodyguards. And from the get-go, we can tell that she will be an interesting character. She’s skilled as a bodyguard with her barrier magic, but she tends to be overly respectful and has a hint of low self-esteem. How her presence would affect the story remains to be seen since the last two episodes are not part of the novel.
Episode 11 is a solid adaptation with brand new content never seen in the novels, so it deserves an 8/10. Starting from this point, I will no longer use the light novels as basis for my review, so I’m really excited how the story will play out in the final two episodes.